Extra $300 unemployment benefits won’t end early in NC, as Cooper vetoes GOP bill
North Carolinians likely won’t be cut off from federal unemployment benefits early, after Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a bill Friday that would have stopped the money.
On top of the normal state-funded unemployment benefits, the federal government originally gave jobless people an extra $600 a week due to COVID-19, although that has since been reduced to $300. But Republican lawmakers wanted to stop North Carolina from taking those payments, saying they think the extra $300 a week is stopping people from going back to work.
“With a severe labor shortage, now is no time to pay people extra money not to work,” Sen. Chuck Edwards, a Republican from Hendersonville, said in late June when the legislature passed the bill.
Cooper said Friday that the extra federal money runs out in September anyway, and he saw no reason to cut people off from it early.
“The federal help that this bill cuts off will only last a few more weeks and it supplements North Carolina’s state benefits, which are among the stingiest in the country,” Cooper said in a press release. “Prematurely stopping these benefits hurts our state by sending back money that could be injected into our economy with people using it for things like food and rent.”
Nationwide, many Republican-run states have ended their residents’ benefits early. But The New York Times reported recently that in Missouri, one of the first to cut off federal unemployment aid, there has been no sign that it worked to get more people back into the workforce.
“Work-force development officials said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants,” The New York Times reported.
The Wall Street Journal also wrote about Missouri and quoted one business owner who said ending the benefits did help with hiring, and another who said it didn’t.
In North Carolina, there’s no question that some employers — especially in the service industry — are having trouble finding workers. The News & Observer reported last month that 80,000 fewer people are working in restaurants and hotels than before the pandemic began, and that “Nearly every restaurant in the Triangle is trying to hire workers — servers, bartenders and especially cooks.”
But the bigger question is why people aren’t going back to work — Republicans have pointed to the federal $300 a week unemployment benefits while Democrats have pointed to the minimum wage and high cost of child care, among other factors.
In his veto announcement, Cooper said he would support a bill “to provide businesses with funds for hiring bonuses.”
The N.C. Senate passed a bill with that idea in early June, which had bipartisan support as well as backing from the N.C. Restaurant and Lodging Association, a service industry lobbying group. It would not have done away with federal benefits but would instead have allowed the money to be turned into $1,500 signing bonuses for anyone who got off unemployment and found a job.
However, even though it passed the Senate with the support of all the Republicans and about half the Democrats, it ran into ideological opposition in the House of Representatives, where conservatives said they wouldn’t support any bill that kept the unemployment money.
So the version of the bill the legislature ended up passing, and which Cooper vetoed Friday, did not contain the $1,500 signing bonuses. Instead it would only have stopped the state from receiving the extra money from the federal government for unemployment.
It passed with no Democratic support in the Senate and only a few Democrats in the House, meaning GOP lawmakers are unlikely to be able to override Cooper’s veto.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published July 2, 2021 at 2:08 PM with the headline "Extra $300 unemployment benefits won’t end early in NC, as Cooper vetoes GOP bill."
